But when a "friend of a friend" came calling with an offer to
appear on Fox & Friends Monday morning,
Rice, who told Business Insider he is a 20-year-old film
student at Columbia College in Chicago, morphed himself into a
23-year-old, unemployed recent college graduate who was forced to
move back in with his parents.

In a phone interview with BI after the appearance today, Rice
said that he didn't go on air intending to punk
Carlson and Fox, but that he felt like a "character"
in Fox News' "movie" when the network fed him talking points and
a narrative.

"They gave me a paragraph full of bullshit talking
points. ... They basically gave me a speech and they thought I
was supposed to have it memorized," Rice said.

Rice forwarded us email exchanges he had with various staffers at
Fox News leading up to his appearance.

Here's a sample from the exchange:

"Great! We will go over details this wknd, but I'm looking
forward. Main focus, as we discussed, is - you voted for
obama based on the promises of hope and change, that he'd fix the
economy...but now you can't find a job, and that promise hasn't
been kept," the producer wrote.

Rice even changed his story during conversations with various Fox
News producers. One time, he said he graduated with a degree in
English. The next conversation, it was a bachelor's in
engineering.

At least one part of Rice's interview was true, he insisted —
that he is supposed to vote for Romney because he lost a game of
basketball to a friend. Still, he's not sure if he will follow
through on that promise.

Rice said he hopes his appearance would give an empirical example
of how the media often disregards facts and stays superficial in
favor of a compelling narrative.

"Ever since Obama's American lapel pin, the coverage has just
been a joke," he said. "We're not talking about things that
actually matter when we're at a low point in our
country.